


martyrs most certainly die too young

by hedgebitch



Series: a savior's a nuisance to live with at home [1]
Category: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, DC Extended Universe, DCU (Comics)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Parenthood, Pre-Relationship, blatant disregard for canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-02
Updated: 2019-12-02
Packaged: 2021-02-24 16:08:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21640720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hedgebitch/pseuds/hedgebitch
Summary: “Bruce can remember a day when he wished the world would end.”orAfter Clark’s funeral, Bruce reaches out to Martha Kent. Martha reaches back.
Relationships: Dick Grayson & Bruce Wayne, Martha Kent & Bruce Wayne, Martha Kent/Bruce Wayne
Series: a savior's a nuisance to live with at home [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1562239
Comments: 14
Kudos: 39





	martyrs most certainly die too young

**Author's Note:**

> in my quest to ignore canon as much as possible because i haven't actually seen this movie, i’ve changed martha’s age, because portraying older women in media is important and also i just can’t pretend someone born in 1965 was born in 1950 even in magic make believe land. this is the most melodramatic bullshit i have ever written and i hope all four people that read it enjoy it deeply.  
> title (and series title) from winds of the old days by joan baez

The world doesn’t end when Superman dies.

It should, many people seem to think. But it doesn’t.

Bruce Wayne is expected at a company event the next morning. He should call in sick. He should turn himself over to the authorities, really. But the world hasn’t ended just because one man has stopped breathing—and that’s all Superman was, at the end of it all. A man.

Bruce Wayne goes home and washes the blood, the literal and the metaphorical and the allegorical, washes all of it from his hands. He makes sure the funeral arrangements will be covered. He will be paying for both and attending neither. He goes to work.

During the drive over, he changes his mind. He enters his office and immediately calls for a paid day off for all Wayne Enterprises employees, ensures overtime will be paid for any hours already worked and for any workers the system can’t function without.

Bruce can remember a day when he wished the world would end.

He ends up paying for two funerals, and attending only one.

He could attend in disguise. He should attend in disguise. Instead, he observes Clark Kent’s funeral with only the shadow of a nearby tree to hide him from Clark’s loved ones.

Alfred had sent him to Kansas with a foil-covered casserole dish, which Bruce takes to the Kent farm after the service. He knocks once, and hears Mrs. Kent bustling around inside.

“Just a moment,” she calls out to him.

He could leave. He should leave. There’s time enough to put the dish on the doorstep and make it back to his rental car before she even makes it to look out the peephole. He stands his ground, instead.

When she answers the door, he does not apologize for her loss, but she does thank him for the food. He can see a pile of dishes on the table in the hall, and can guess at what might have been keeping her so busy in the kitchen.

He offers to help, and she turns to ice.

“If this is an attempt at apologizing,” she tells him bluntly, leaving the “for killing my son,” unspoken, “it is neither appreciated nor remotely successful.”

“This is not,” he tells her in full sincerity, “an apology.”

She scrutinizes him, then very carefully offers up her permission. “Come on in.”

He follows her into the house, into the kitchen, and gets busy moving ice from the freezer to the empty coolers set up on the floor, as Mrs. Kent resumes carefully reorganizing the limited fridge space.

There’s a question implicit in her stare, and after several minutes of expectant silence, he gives in and answers it.

“They sent flowers,” he says, “when my son died.”

Her reservation opens into understanding almost at once, and she nods as if the air around them has slowed, so he continues, because at least for this moment, he can keep her world from spinning on.

“Hundreds, maybe thousands of arrangements. We started donating them to local cemeteries when the front hall filled up, but the whole house smelled like a hospital gift shop for weeks, even after all the flowers were gone. I’d have lost my mind if there’d been any semblance of it left to lose.”

There is something warmer in the air when he finishes. He has taken so much of her, already, through surveillance, through research, that it seems only fair that she should offer nothing in return. A story for a story. A son for a son.

They put away the kitchen in a comfortable silence. Bruce’s arrival came late enough in the evening that only one more well-wisher stops by, just after they’ve managed to find a place for everything. Martha thanks her neighbour for their condolences, and returns to the kitchen with an apple pie.

“Alright,” she says, game face on. “We’re switching this one for the half-eaten one on the top shelf, and grabbing the…the lasagne one shelf down, in the red dish.”

Bruce follows her orders without a second thought, and only realizes he’s been invited to dinner when she pulls out two plates to serve onto rather than one. A good technique to develop, he thinks, not expecting the pang in his chest that follows the thought, when your son can fly away at superspeed. 

He pulls two chairs from the kitchen table out onto the porch, and they eat outside. Rather than sit in silence, they make small talk, tiptoeing as best they can around the big blue elephant in the room. When they’ve both cleared their plates, Martha takes the dishes back inside, and returns with two glasses of whiskey.

She holds one out to Bruce and he takes it; when she takes a sip of her own, he does the same. There is no point in trying to fool her, and even if the earth were on the brink of another invasion, Batman has no plans on making any appearances. For tonight, the world is stopped. 

“What gets me is that it looks just like any other night,” Martha says, looking up at the stars. “Like if we tried hard enough, we could pretend they’re out there somewhere.”

“It’s been a long time since I felt I could pretend that,” Bruce admits.

“Try anyway,” Martha suggests. “For me.”

He takes another sip of whiskey, mulling the prospect over before deciding. “Okay—I’ll try.”

“Tell me about your son,” she prompts him, after a moment.

“I have two, and neither one is on speaking terms with me, right now.”

She looks a little surprised at this new information, but admonishes him all the same. “You said you’d try.”

“I did,” Bruce acknowledges. “Alright. Pretending. Dick, my oldest, is living in Blüdhaven and not speaking to me. Recently broke off an engagement, according to the tabloids. Jason…turned seventeen a couple months ago. He likes…”

Bruce breaks off for a moment to decide. He considers the person Jason was, the man he could have grown to be, the places he might have stopped at along the way there.

“He likes long books and fast cars. There’s…there’s someone in his English class he wants to ask to prom, but he’s nervous because they’re not already dating. He wants to volunteer with the Peace Corps before going to college, but he hasn’t told me yet because he thinks I’ll get mad.”

“Will you?”

“Get mad? I don’t think I could if I tried.”

Martha smiles ruefully at that. “Yeah, I know a little something about teenage boys with their hearts set on saving the world, too.”

“And what about the men they grow up to be?”

“Those—those, I’m still learning about.” 

“Tell me about him,” he offers as the silence between them grows. A son for a son.

“About Superman or about Clark?” she asks wryly.

“About your son,” he amends, hoping she understands. If the man wasn’t both, he couldn’t have been either.

Martha smiles in response, so he must have said the right thing.

“The thing people forget about good people, about good men, is that at the end of the day…he was just a man.”

Bruce hears his own thoughts echo in her words, but he can’t swallow enough of the guilt overwhelming him to voice that. Instead, he makes the move of a coward and shifts the direction of their conversation.

“Has anyone told you he died well yet?” he asks, the words dark and bitter after the softness of the pretense.

She nods wordlessly.

“People like to say that of soldiers—that dying bravely and willingly is dying well. I think it’s supposed to be comforting.”

“Dying and dying well don’t seem particularly compatible.”

They finish their drinks together—in silence, yet again. Bruce sleeps in Clark’s old room, and does his best not to think of the ghosts. He wakes up first in the morning, so he heads down to the kitchen to start up the coffeemaker and pull something acceptable enough for breakfast out from the fridge.

Martha hugs him goodbye, tells him he’s welcome back any time. He doesn’t intend to take her up on it—but then only a week later, he finds himself at her door again with a nice Bordeaux, courtesy of Alfred.

And then she’s inviting him back for Thanksgiving, because it’s only a couple of days away anyway, and Alfred comes too, evidently solely to enact a nefarious plot of his own devising, because he invites Martha to the manor for Christmas. She looks a little daunted by the prospect, so Bruce quickly explains that it’s a subdued event—his only surviving family happens to be Jewish, so it’s likely to just be him and Alfred. Of course, Dick and whoever he’s currently seeing have an open invitation to show up whenever—Dick’s the only reason they even celebrate Christmas at the manor—but that’s historically unlikely to happen.

Historical precedent does little to stop the disappointment when the holiday ends without word from Dick. Martha is there, though, a steady, calming reminder that despite his best efforts to appear otherwise, Bruce is still human.

“He’s safe,” she tells him, “and that’s what matters.”

She’s not there on New Year’s Day, but she’s only a phone call away when Dick finally—well, he doesn’t reach out to Bruce, not exactly, but he tells Alfred to send his regards, which is pretty much the most contact he’s had with Bruce since—since Jason died.

February 17th is a Sunday. Bruce is fiddling with Martha’s oven, adjusting the temperature gauge just a bit to account for the trouble she’s been complaining about lately, when his phone rings.

Well, vibrates—there are only five numbers he has set to ring through, at least one of which he knows will never call him again, and another of which he highly suspects the same. He means to ignore it, but Martha takes a quick glance at the caller ID.

“Six zero nine—that’s Blüdhaven, isn’t it?”

Four years spent travelling the world, learning martial arts from the greatest instructors on the planet. Seven months of which saw too many of his nights spent with the daughter of an immortal assassin. Apparently, all useless, because Martha still smirks when he takes a brief recess from fixing her oven to answer the call.

“Hello, Bruce speaking,” he says, his standard answer for his personal line.

“Hi.”

It’s been over a year since Bruce last saw Dick, since the funeral. He’s heard his voice, heard both his sons’ screams every night since, but it takes him a split second to register Dick’s voice on the other end when he’s speaking calmly—albeit a little nervously—instead of yelling at him.

“It’s good to hear from you.”

_ Is it Dick? _ Martha mouths at him, preemptively celebratory. Bruce doesn’t nod—doesn’t need to. She’s seen enough of his emotional range to know she’s right.

“I, uh. I heard things were—not as bad as they…were,” Dick explains. There’s something more than just awkwardness behind his hesitancy, but distance has made it hard for Bruce to place.

“They aren’t,” Bruce confirms.

“Good, that’s—good.”

“Is everything okay?” 

“Yeah, everything is fine. Or, well, I guess, pretty much fine. I just. I’ve been thinking, lately, a lot. About you, taking me in after…and about Jason, and how things felt when…I don’t know. ”

It’s the cadence, the way Dick foregoes rhythm in favour of stressing each syllable equally, that finally tips Bruce off—whatever it is that got Dick upset enough to break radio silence, it’s important enough that he’s not thinking about it in English. 

Bruce checks his watch. It’s just after noon in Kansas—making it 2:03 over on the east coast. Plenty of time, in that case.

“Do you,” he starts, then finds himself having to swallow and start again. “Would you like to come by for dinner and talk? I’m sure Alfred would love to have you.”

“I can, uh—wait. Did you just offer to ‘talk?’ Do I have the right number?”

Bruce bites back the instinct to tease back. They’ve lost so much, changed so much, but he’s confident he still knows Dick well enough to know what would entail a crossed line.

“I’m trying,” he says instead, “something new.”

“Oh,” Dick says, but the surprise is warmer than Bruce had expected. “Well. I’ve got…a shift…at 8, so I would have to get someone to cover for me, which means I can’t do dinner but…if I leave by 6:30…we could talk before?” 

A commercial flight from Kansas to Gotham takes about three hours. Fortunately, Bruce took a very different sort of plane to brunch.

“It’ll be fine,” Martha tells him as she hugs him goodbye. “He doesn’t want to lose you, either.”

Bruce manages to arrive at the manor around the same time that Dick gets in from Blüdhaven on his bike—Alfred sends Dick down to the cave to greet him just as Bruce is finishing up with the Batplane.

“Where were  _ you _ ?” Dick asks, looking Bruce up and down curiously as he runs a hand through his helmet hair, as if there hasn’t been a gulf between them for two years running.

“Kansas,” Bruce says, and then, “What’s wrong?”

Dick sobers at that, starts fidgeting with his now empty hands. After a few seconds, Alfred calls out from the elevator to suggest they take their  _ enthralling _ conversation into the manor, and the two men both comply easily. 

Dick never quite says what’s wrong. They sit in Bruce’s study, with tea foisted on them by Alfred, and talk, until 6:35 exactly, when Dick smiles a tight smile that a year ago, Bruce could’ve sworn meant he was lying, but now, he isn’t nearly as certain about, and says, “If I’m more than a half hour late, I’ll be out of a job.”

“Might I enquire as to what he wished to say to you?” Alfred asks Bruce, down in the cave a couple hours later, as Bruce is preparing for patrol.

“He wanted to thank me, he said,” Bruce tells Alfred, still mulling over what exactly could be going on in Dick’s life to warrant this. Maybe something with Barbara?

“You say that as if you believe otherwise,” Alfred responds, patiently needling Bruce further towards his point.

He could call Barbara right now and ask—but Oracle has only just started working with him again, after everything that happened in November. She won’t be elated to hear him asking after her personal life so soon.

“He asked me if I would undo it if I could—taking him, taking them in, I mean.”

“And how did you respond?”

“I told him that…that I know I’ve made mistakes, I know I’ve failed him, but…but I could never regret taking him in.”

“It sounds, then, like you said the right thing,” Alfred tells him, and Bruce despises how desperately he needs that affirmation. “But do tell Mister Grayson that if he sets foot in this house again without offering me more than a passing greeting, he can consider his open invitations closed.”

“You sure are keen on family dinners for someone who refuses to eat with me,” Bruce retorts, hoping the petulance will calm his nerves, but he pulls out his personal cell to invite Dick back all the same.

The computer interrupts them with an alert—the signal has just been lit. Bruce goes to put his phone aside, then reconsiders.

Fuck it. He takes the extra two seconds to text Dick before heading for the car. Martha will judge him  _ harshly _ if she finds out he prioritized Batman over reconciliation with his son.

Dick agrees to dinner, which turns out to be more difficult to schedule than anticipated, what with Dick working nights, and Bruce “working” nights. They finally find a day about three weeks out that works.

Martha is in Gotham the next morning, interrogating Bruce with more skill and zeal than most D list villains as to every single thing that happened, and Bruce is shocked to realize how natural, how normal, answering her feels.

The good parts, of course, can’t dream of covering up the bad. Bruce still smells smoke in his dreams. Martha catches herself setting out a third plate at dinner one night and stares at her own hands in confusion. When things like that happen, they have a system in place. Bruce pours two lemonades, or two coffees, or two gin and tonics, and Martha pulls the kitchen chairs out to the porch or tells Alfred they’ll be walking the grounds for a bit, and they regroup and talk.

It’s during one of these talks that Bruce notices that something has changed. He’s telling Martha how he’d like for her to meet Dick, because he thinks she’d like talking to him, and has to stop himself short from saying she’d like Jason as well, for very different reasons.

“I keep thinking the same thing about Clark,” she tells him. “About what it would be like if he could have met the  _ you _ you are now.”

“Really?” Bruce asks, because he wasn’t aware until now that he’s apparently become a different “you.”

“If you’d known him, I think you might have loved him,” she says.

It takes a moment for Bruce to understand why the sentiment feels so bittersweet, so self-deprecating. He responds and then all at once he realizes.

“I think I could have,” he grants her, hesitant for fear of startling her. “But experience suggests I’m more likely to have fallen for you.”

The world doesn’t end when Clark Kent dies. By all accounts, it probably should, but it spins on, regardless.

**Author's Note:**

> broke: bruce falls in love with clark by forming parasocial bonds through talking to martha (a trope i’ve seen Way Too Many Times)  
> woke: bruce falls in love with martha bc it’s **_MY_** au and **_I_** get to choose the rarepair  
> hmu on tumblr @[nightflings](https://nightflings.tumblr.com/) if you want to see more of the weird world i’ve built, and (MAJOR suicide tw) [here’s](https://nightflings.tumblr.com/post/189380387817/some-other-beginnings-end) a free depressing dick grayson snippet that it made no sense to put into this segment. also i know zach snyder said the dead robin was dick but death of the fucking author babey!


End file.
